A Thousand Splendid Suns

As I have posted previously, I really liked The Kite Runner, Khalad Hosseini's first novel, and I was eagerly anticipating reading A Thousand Splendid Suns. I was not disappointed. Hosseini takes us back to Kabul, Afghanistan again from the time before the Soviet invasion through the Taliban take over. Unlike in The Kite Runner, the main characters were not able to escape the country and so we live through these tumultuous decades with them. Mariam and Laila are very different women approximately 15 years apart in age, but they end up married to the same man. As Hosseini tells both of their stories he is also telling the story of many Afghan women who lived through the Soviet-run period (women are equal to men) and the Taliban-run time (women will not show their faces). Although written simply, Marian and Laila became vivid to my imagination and I found that I cared very much about what would happen to them. It was difficult to read about the sorrows of the Afghan people, but an important education in a culture I am not too familiar with.